Living With a Wild God: A Non-Believer’s Search for the Truth about Everything Kindle Edition
by Barbara Ehrenreich (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
3.7 out of 5 stars 322 ratings
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As a teenager Barbara Ehrenreich was an atheist and a rationalist, determined to understand the meaning of life. During this time she would regularly have minor experiences of dissociation, of seeing the world in a strange light. Then when she was 17, while on a skiing trip, she had an overwhelming, cataclysmic 'mystical' experience, far more rapturous and ecstatic than anything she had had before. The rapture would return later in life, but never with the same intensity.These episodes, and the rational Ehrenreich's ongoing argument with them, are at the core of this unique book. To try to understand the experience of some sort of force, 'out there', trying to communicate with her, Ehrenreich, a renowned investigative writer and self-described myth-buster, reads neurology, theology, philosophy, and accounts of other people's mystical experiences. Interwoven with her research is the story of the precocious adolescent that she once was, and a moving memoir of the life that shaped her.
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Review
"[Ehrenreich] resolutely avoids rhetoric in that 'blubbery vein'--which is why her book is such a rare feat...She struggles to make sense of the epiphany without recourse to the 'verbal hand-wavings about mystery and transcendence' that go with the territory... Ehrenreich has no interest in conversion...She wants, and inspires, open minds."―The Atlantic
"The questions in the world may be infinite, but perhaps the answers are few. And however we define that mystery, there's no escaping our essential obligation to it, for it may, as Ehrenreich writes, 'be seeking us out.'"―New York Times Book Review
"Ehrenreich has always been an intellectual and a journalistic badass... [She] ultimately arrives at a truce with the idea of God. You'll admire her journey."
―Entertainment Weekly
"The factor that makes each of [Barbara's] books so completely unique in American intellectual life is her persistent sensitivity to matters of social class. She can always see through the smokescreen, the cloud of fibs we generate to make ourselves feel better about a world where the work of the many subsidizes the opulent lifestyles of the few. That, plus the fact that she writes damned well. Better than almost anyone out there, in fact."―Salon
"As personal a piece of writing as she has ever done... A surprising turn for Ehrenreich, who for more than 40 years has been one of our most accomplished and outspoken advocacy journalists and activists."―The Los Angeles Times
"Until reading LIVING WITH A WILD GOD I counted the Mary Karr memoir trilogy as my favorite from a contemporary literary figure. Now, Ehrenreich's memoir is tied for first place with Karr's books... Thank goodness [this book] exists. It is quite likely to rock the minds of readers who dare open to the first page."―Houston Chronicle
"A smart and enjoyable read... Ehrenreich maintains a grip on a sensible skepticism about religious matters - and a positive hostility toward the idea of unthinking faith - while avoiding the narrow-minded excesses that more zealous atheists sometimes fall victim to."―The Chicago Tribune --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. Winner of the 2018 Erasmus Prize for her work as an investigative journalist, she has a PhD in cellular immunology from Rockefeller University and writes frequently about health care and medical science, among many other subjects. She lives in Virginia.
--This text refers to the hardcover edition.
Product details
ASIN : B00GPDN5GC
Publisher : Granta Books (April 3, 2014)
Publication date : April 3, 2014
Language : English
File size : 611 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
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StrangePegs
4.0 out of 5 stars Not an Easy ReadReviewed in the United States on March 2, 2015
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So a bit of preamble about this one:
1. This is not a religious book, not in the traditional sense. The "God" Ehrenreich is talking about is not the Christian god nor any kind of monotheistic god. It is not god in any sense that we generally think about "God."
2. I've previously read a couple other of Ehrenreich's books (Nickel and Dimed and Bright-sided) and really enjoyed them. She approaches her topics with dogged determination and doesn't let go till she gets to the truth of the matter. I've never, however, taken the time to learn anything about her other than that she was a journalist who eased into books. As it turns out, her background is in science and she, in fact, has a PhD in... well, I forget in what, because she shifted what she was studying numerous times, and I forget what the doctorate finally ended up being in (and I don't feel like trying to find it, now). Something to do with immunology, though, I think. The science background explains why her investigative work has always been so thorough, though.
Speaking of science, this book contains a lot of hard science, descriptions and explanations, things I found fascinating (especially her experience with the silicon oscillations), but I can understand this being a barrier to many (maybe most?) readers. In fact, I scanned through some of the negative reviews of the book and many of them had to do with "too much science" or "I couldn't understand all the science." This book is definitely not written to be easily accessible to a large audience as her other books are. This book is personal, so all of the science, which is intensely personal to her, is left in. I'm not sure the book can even get to where it's trying to go without the science.
The other thing that can be an issue with the book is that it takes Ehrenreich a long time to get where she's going. She mentions in the foreword that there was an "event," a mystical experience, that happened to her when she was a teenager and that figuring out exactly what that was was part of the impetus for Living with a Wild God, so you start reading and expect to find out about this event and her quest, but... what you get is her childhood. And it was a horrible childhood, not that it seems she saw it that way at the time. When you grow up in that, though, you think it's normal.
It takes a long time to get to the event and, the whole time I was reading, I kept wondering what the point was of all the stuff she was telling me. Why did I want or need to know about her childhood and, well, everything else? But I trusted her, based on my prior reading experience with her (and the story she was telling really was interesting even though it seemed as if it had nothing to do with what the book was supposed to be about), to be going somewhere, so I kept reading. Then, eventually, we do get to the event, and it all made sense. I mean, without all of the background (and I do mean all of the background), I don't think you can really understand the significance of what happened and what happened after.
So I'm going to go back and say that this is not a religious book. This is not a book about how some atheist went out searching for the Truth and had a conversion experience (as in The Case for Christ). This is a book about an atheist who went out searching for the Truth and found... something. Something unexplainable. Something that isn't the "good and loving" god that Christians so often hold up as a happiness dispenser. What she found was something... primal. Chaotic. Only "good" in the sense that a storm can be good or a forest fire can be good.
This is not a book for people who already think they know it all and who think they have all the answers, especially about who and what god is. This is a book for those, like in Wizard of Oz, who are willing to look behind the curtain. Don't plan on an easy read.
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S. Magliocco
4.0 out of 5 stars Memoir of an Extraordinary Spiritual ExperienceReviewed in the United States on May 17, 2016
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Part memoir, part inquiry into extraordinary experience, Barbara Ehrenreich's _Living With a Wild God_ offers stirring insights into the life of this important feminist author and cultural critic. Spurred by the rediscovery of a diary from her teen years, the author explores aspects of her family background, upbringing, and youth that led her to have an extraordinary spiritual experience just before she went to college. Because of her family's ideology and the general social taboo against speaking of these kinds of experiences, as well as their ineffable quality, Ehrenreich buried her experience and never spoke of it. But this silence ultimately took its toll on her life, until the need to rediscover and explore it in full made itself known to her in late middle age.
As a scholar who has spent a lifetime studying extraordinary experiences across cultures, I was very familiar with the kind of experience she described; it is, perhaps, not so extraordinary, but part of the register of human experiences that lead to the development of spiritual beliefs. What fascinated me more were the details of childhood and young adulthood the author reveals, and the transformation that made her care passionately about the world we inhabit and want to make it a better place. That story gets relatively short shrift in this memoir, but it's the one that really captivated me as I read it.
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kb from la
4.0 out of 5 stars At first disappointing, but then...Reviewed in the United States on April 15, 2014
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Barbara Ehrenreich is an author whose books were important influences on my generation of feminist/socialists. Hearts of Men and Nickle and Dimed are classics. So when I saw that, now in her 70s, she’s produced a book on spirituality I was eager to read it.
Living with a Wild God focuses on a set of dissociative moments experienced by Ehrenreich during her childhood and teen years. Uncanny insights into the nature of being? Encounters with the divine? Brain freeze explosions? An atheist, Ehrenreich refuses to give a conventional religious interpretation to what happened. In fact she doesn’t want to corrupt the purity of experience by interpreting or defining these moments at all. Okay, but then why write a book that keeps circling back to these incidents only to back away from explaining why they feel so crucial to her life story?
What results from all this is a weirdly unsatisfying memoir. We get the story of a brainly misfit growing up in a dysfunctional household headed by an alcoholic father and miserably unhappy, abusive mother. Ehrenreich’s enjoyably snarky voice, which works so well in most of her writing, falls flat here. Other than a nicely mean account of her adolesence in LA (like the Kerouac of Big Sur, she hates the California sun) the author skates along the surface of her life story, meting out a kind of impersonal contempt to everyone including her solipsistic youthful self. High school, college, grad school, marriage, motherhood, the anti-war movement… blah, blah.
I was now, according to my kindle, 80% of the way through the book. Suddenly, bam! A whole new kind of writing starts happening. In a deeply personal tone, Ehrenreich tells us why she wrote Living with a Wild God. Middle aged, with her second marriage crumbling and progressive politics rapidly diminishing as a force in American political life, she sank into depression. (How many of us followed that trajectory?) Returning to investigate her youthful dips into the twilight zone offered itself as a strategy to beat back the pain and sadness. In turn, engaging new sources of knowledge outside of what might be called the rationalist paradigm seems to have given Ehrenreich the healing energy to do ever more good work.
I’m still of two minds about her book. Why the choice of such a dispassionate, skeptical mode of address to narrate the story of her early life? But on balance, whatever Barbara Ehrenreich cares to say, I’m glad to listen.
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k
5.0 out of 5 stars I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- althoughReviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016
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Ehrenreich is a cynical observer of American life and she finds it hypocritical and full of artifice. She is dead-on! Now, I was a CCD teacher for years and still teach in a Catholic school and would love to assign this book to my students -- although I'd be fired in a nonce!
Ms E was raised an atheist, claims she still is one (sort-of) and has an impressive scientific background (PhD cellular biology.) Her greatest fear in life, or at least one of them, is to be taken as a fool. At the same time, she has an integrity that many lack: she does not privilege one aspect of reality over any others and this quality is absolutely bedrock for sound thinking. Part of HER reality has been a series of extraordinary experiences that even she, the original Show-Me Gal, describes as mystical.
Toward the end of this book Ms E asserts that those who have emptied themselves of ego and made "room" for "Whatever" they "encounter" (Ms E stresses this word) are more likely to have this type of mystical experience. Her own testimony, however, belies this. No one has a stronger ego than the cynical Ms E and her account of her own life indicates she never, even as a child, made room for anything other than her own priorities. And, still . . . "it" happened to her all the same.
That is not unusual. For example, the great 19th century revivalist, Charles Grandison Finney, was a mundane lawyer and a bit of a skeptic to boot when one evening, entirely unbidden, "it" descended upon him. What Christians call the "Holy Spirit,", a Presence that "like the wind, listeth where it will" -- and, in fact, that quote is from the Bible in reference to this phenomenon -- hit him with gale force,
These various personal encounters have in common features which make nonsense of conventional religiosity. The "God" who reveals himself is not the Deity of the Sunday Schools anymore than it is the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Mr E calls it a "Wild God" and that accords with the testimony of others. What reveals Itself has variously been described as "savage" and even "primitive." "It" is simply not like anything in "our" world -- rather, it is something utterly alien.
These encounters usually fill the recipient with an ecstatic joy so excessive that it is frightening and potentially destructive. Finney recalled that as wave after wave of love washed over him he pleaded with God to relent lest he, Finney, be destroyed. Muhammed, we are told, was near-suicidal after his "encounter." If we call this experience "God," then He is "beyond good and evil" (paradoxically, a quote from the same philosopher who proclaimed that "God is dead.) Some who have had this experience found it terrifying because they experienced God as absolutely void of all qualities -- an eternal, vast emptiness. (In fact, this makes a sort of sense -- for, if God has a quality, by human definition, then He is limited since that precludes his possessing all other qualities. Thus, He is, like "white light" -- impossible to see but possessing all colors.)
The sort of terrifying encounter Ms E describes makes a mockery of all morality, custom, conventions and, most especially, theology. What is encountered is so far beyond human ken that the mind jumps at once to the Biblical warning, "My ways are not your ways." The one who experiences this epiphany is usually left drained -- in some cases his or her personality is temporarily shattered.
There are many who ascribe these experiences to mental illness or something-or-other firing in some-way-or-another in the synapses of the brain. That is as it may be. The experience itself, however, is most remarkable for the insistence of nearly all who have undergone it that what is encountered is utterly alien to humanity. "It" is the temporary presence of a Being, if that is the right word (Ms E, like all others who have gone through this, describe it as a living presence), that is unlike any fact, theory or extrapolation from theory that humankind can muster. It can be experienced but not known. It can be (somewhat) remembered but never, even in the least, understood. It is at once joyful and savage, loving and terrifying. It is wholly "Other."
How one regards Ms E's experience is up to the reader. But, her account seems honest and as descriptive as she can manage by way of liming what can not be described. "It" makes nonsense of all our assumptions about "God" and even "reality."
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Barry J.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, quite a woman, and quite a tale - great storytelling, and lots of insight.Reviewed in the United States on October 21, 2018
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As an atheist ex altar boy, I have a certain sensitivity for book titles that sound like they might be preaching to the agnostic or atheist choir, or at least to me. This was one of those that appeared in a list of her previous work, ALL of which I wanted to read, based only on the title. I resolved to start with a single book and see what I thought about her and the subject matter and I didn't know what else. Given the aformentioned sensitiviity, this was the one I chose, and spent a totally involved, smiling, enthralled number of hours, spread over perhaps 2 weeks reading and going back over, and reading further, and smiling a bit more. I haven't had this much fun or enlightenment out of a book since Catch 22.
I could go on, but I won't. Do yourself a favor and read this book, you'll be a better person for it. And just so we're clear, you'll be a better person even if you're NOT an atheist.
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Judith Kelsey-Powell
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius and courageReviewed in the United States on January 26, 2015
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In this extraordinary memoir, the stepping of point is the revisiting adolescent musings about the nature and meaning of life addressed to an older self. There is something special about someone who would first trust herself to keep those pages and then years later treat them seriously. She suggests that perhaps if she had a family religious tradition she might have a framework within which to understand an experience she can only describe as mystic, but as a third generation atheist, she was left with psychiatric explanations that seemed inadequate.
This is a work that deserves to take its place next to Henry James and Rudolf Otto, not because it finds answers to the basic questions of human existence, but precisely because it does not. It makes the quest itself central and is willing to posit the notion that we may in fact know far less about the universe than we might like or even need to believe (the concept of belief itself being problematic). Most importantly for me, there is a recognition that experiencing the Other does not frequently reveal transcendent benevolence. This is truly the wild God of the title, not the domesticated Being commonly understood by contemporary adherents of religion.
This is a compelling work worthy of revisiting by the reader and perhaps by the writer. This is a quest that is not readily concluded.
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4.0 out of 5 stars FascinatingReviewed in the United States on May 14, 2017
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I was intrigued by her story. Relentless self-critical and observant, as well as extremely smart, she seemed at first to be the ultimate introvert, forever trying to find an explanation for everything. (Of course as she matured she mostly gave up that goal and succumbed the middle-class life that captures almost everyone.) She had a life-changing experience at age 17, which I wish she had explained more fully. I also wish she had taken psychedelic drugs and reported on her experience and compared it to the "world on fire" that she saw internally. It's odd that the best description in her book of such an experience was by Daniel Quinn on p. 216: "Everything was on fire...Every blade of grass, every single tree was radiant, was blazing - incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine...But there was no violence or hatred in this rage. This was a rage of joy, of exuberance. This was creation's everlasting, silent hallelujah." Sounds a lot like my first mushroom trip. Barbara is one of a kind.
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Athena
3.0 out of 5 stars A smart mind struggling with an experienceReviewed in the United States on July 13, 2016
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Very interesting discussion of an experience of the world that could be considered religious or mystical. The author is a non-believer who seems to feel that there must be something to believe about the world. But what? Her experience of the world seems to suggest more to the world than the insignificant bits of energy that "accidentally" created it. But the author does not discuss the philosophy of science to any degree. Instead, she discusses the experience of life itself that kept recurring throughout her life, and shows it as a challenge and mystery to her. She attempts to reduce it to psychological states. I found it a very interesting look into an intelligent mind.
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Pagan Tart
3.0 out of 5 stars Ehrenreich held backReviewed in the United States on May 7, 2014
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Erenreich had a moment when she was 17 when the world around her seemed to burst into flames. It seemed, at least to her, it was almost a holy or mystical experience or a brain malfunction. After she writes about this and her description is excellent, the book wanders off to a telling of her life. Enrenreich has led an interesting life, but i wanted to know more about this world of flame experience she had. It is not until the last few page she gets around to this by explaining what exists in the universe and the energy and playfulness the universe seems to display and it is not until the last line where she writes, "it seems to be seeking us." Well, for me, i wanted a bit more and i had hoped the book would go into more about this experience sooner. I felt she was holding back and did not want to admit the universe may have a purpose. She can write only one sentence at the very end of the book that maybe there's something going on that perhaps could lead to a fuller understanding of the Cosmos and its mysteries?
I wanted to say, c'mon Ehrenreich, you're an excellent writer, scientist, journalist, don't hold back. What are you afraid of?
Pat Mckeage
I would like to add more. It has been a month or more since i read her book and have loaned it to a friend. After thinking it over in the past hour she as said more than i previously thought. My husband of 56 years recently died and i was too impatient for an answer and yes, i did want a more clear, positive answer that "there's something out there." While i do not take back entirely my previous thoughts, her book i now realize is almost pure genius.
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Jean E. Peterson
3.0 out of 5 stars Living with a Wild God.Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2014
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I found the title amusing as the author doesn't like to use that word or anything spiritual or meta-physical. It was a hard book for me to read.How she had to dis-associate from the mixed messages she received, from her father to" question everything" and her mother who said she " wasn't special". Her mother seemed the more abusive,slapping her,etc.But the parents nightly alcohol- fused fights left no safe place for her, but science which became her God. She is extremely bright, a fact she likes to remind the reader of with her technical logic and expressions. Besides knowledge I didn't get a sense of what she loved, no mention of marriages or parental feelings. The last of the book in her response to nature I think she finally felt at home. Her being an atheist seemed beside the point. How she survived as well as she did is the what I find valuable in her life story.
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